Transport of delight

As our road traffic problems get bigger and harder, Juliette Jowit finds how ‘small and soft’ ideas can add up to smart mobility

It’s hard to remember the optimism and excitement that once greeted new roads in Britain. When a bypass opened around Maidstone in the 1960s, there were parties to celebrate the end of the town’s traffic problems. The opening of the M2 motorway through Kent the same year led a local newspaper to write: “The Medway towns will never be gridlocked again.”

How naive it sounds now. Maidstone is in the grip of our 21st-century traffic plague – along with thousands of other British cities, towns, suburbs and villages. “It’s horrible,” says Geoff Dossetter, external affairs director of the Freight Transport Association. “The rush hour, morning and evening, in and out of Maidstone, is absolutely horrendous.”

The jubilant national pride of those motorway boom years is almost incredible now. But road building – including London’s orbital M25, infamous as ‘the world’s biggest car park’ – did bring benefits to many. “That’s one side people tend to overlook, what it was like before,” says Edmund King, executive director of the RAC Foundation. Heavy local traffic had been highly intrusive. When the orbital opened to relieve it, King recalls interviewing a farmer who described his joy at being able to sit outside his local pub with a pipe, undisturbed. There have always been objectors to road building, of course. But it was only a few far-sighted people who foresaw the extent to which new roads would simply encourage more traffic, and lock Britain into an expensive and frustrating cycle of congestion and concrete.

“A package of measures can be tailored to the individual town, company or football supporters’ club.”

Today’s politicians are more wary. The downsides of our love affair with the car have become too apparent. Anyone who sounded triumphant when they cut the tape on a new road would invite a volley of well-rehearsed counter-argument. There’s the Maidstone conundrum: big roads eventually lead to a bigger traffic problem. The economic costs of congestion: traffic jams waste time and resources estimated at £20 billion a year in the UK, to say nothing of the personal costs of missed bedtimes and stress. The air pollution indictment: vehicle exhaust is responsible for thousands of places in Britain where air quality will soon fail European tests. And, of course, global warming: road transport contributes a quarter of Britain’s greenhouse gas emissions.

It’s hard, too, to find big money for big schemes these days. Britain’s railway network, for all its potential to take traffic and freight off the roads, suffers from chronic under-investment, hamstrung by the high cost of new or updated infrastructure. And, as road costs have soared, they too become ever harder for government to justify, with enormous competing pressures on public spending, particularly from health and education.

Think small, think smart

If mega-building is no road forward, there’s still no escaping the fact that our problem is huge. But the answers may not be. There is a new generation of transport professionals at work, proving that small is big when it comes to transport. Dozens if not hundreds of projects are improving walking, cycling and public transport, or simply telling people about other ways to get around. Taken together, these can have a real impact on helping people stay mobile while reducing car use.

“Small is big when it comes to changing transport.”

It has come to be known as the ‘small and soft’ approach. The label risks understating its importance, warns Jamie Wallace, principal sustainability advisor for Forum for the Future. “‘Soft’ sounds a bit flaky, whereas road-building is about ‘hard’ measures, ‘serious’ stuff. I don’t buy into that.” He’d rather we talked about ‘smarter choices’, a more confident distinction between what has not worked, and what can.

Somebody who has been doing the smart stuff for longer than most is Brian Smith. As deputy chief executive at Cambridgeshire County Council, his brief covers transport and environment, and he’s a former chairman of Travelwise, a professional network dedicated to reducing car use. “People have realised that isolated big measures aren’t the answer, that the big measures can send out the right signals, [but] what’s more often effective is the package of measures,” says Smith. “Often it’s the sum of the parts that makes a big difference.”

And what a difference. The ‘packages’ range in scale from projects to encourage school children to walk to school, to whole cities revolutionising their attitude to how people move around. The results: reductions in car use as high as 30%, and up to 60% growth in public transport.

It’s a startlingly cost-effective approach, too. Lynn Sloman, drawing on a study for her new book Car Sick, estimates the benefits are on average ten times the costs. Nothing ‘soft’ about those kinds of figures – that’s ‘smart’ economics by any standard. By comparison, even the most ardent advocates of the Crossrail rail line across London can’t claim that the relief it promises will be coming cheap; at £10 billion it has an estimated cost to benefit ratio of 1:2. As for the government’s ten-year transport plan, announced in 2000 but long abandoned, it involved no less than £180 billion in spending, including 360 miles of major road widening and more than 300 other major road schemes – but still forecast traffic growth.

Changes in the big picture won’t all come from the ‘small and soft’ side, of course. The current ‘big idea’ on the traffic planning front is nationwide road pricing. Hardly ‘small’, though in some ways it’s the archetype of the ‘smart’ approach writ large. Its declared objective is more ‘rational’ allocation of scarce road space, rather than simple deterrence of car use. And an upfront trip-by-trip price ticket, placing a premium on prime time and a penalty on under-occupancy, ought to sharpen our appetites for better routes to mobility. Including – but not limited to – the ‘don’t travel’ option. Every forecaster is factoring in a further shift to the digital realm, for ‘virtual’ travel, online shopping, conferencing and the like, but it won’t deliver solutions for every need.

Only connect

The defining feature of the small-is-big transport revolution is that there is no one headline solution; by its nature it depends on doing a variety of different things, each package tailored to the individual town, company or football supporters’ club. The consistent message, time and again, is that there has to be a package of measures.

One reason is basic human nature: “We all respond to different behaviour signals,” says Smith. The other is more practical: a chain is only as strong as its weakest link. Well-meant but isolated schemes – companies providing showers for cyclists but no lockers for their washbags, or bus operators starting new routes without advertising them properly – are all too familiar to Colin Black, who works for JMP consultants and advises companies on travel plans for the government’s Energy Saving Trust. “The most effective schemes are the ones that put measures in place for showering and cycling facilities, improved public transport and a marketing strategy that works.”

Beyond that, the concept can take you pretty well anywhere, but divides into two broad areas – the ‘small’ and the ‘soft’.

Small measures are low-key physical changes, ranging from the fairly ambitious – a city-wide cycle network – to the obscure but perceptive – somewhere for visitors to leave cycle helmets and panniers at a National Trust property in Bristol. They tend to orientate around walking, cycling, and bus routes. To make walking more attractive, for example, the campaign group Living Streets advocates a long menu of improvements which embraces cleaning up litter, taking out railings so people can cross the road more easily, mending pavements, keeping shop shutters up and lights on to make streets feel more friendly. Long-term pedestrian-friendly schemes also generally benefit local traders, despite their often-vociferous fears that people won’t shop where they can’t easily drive. Norwich is offered as a model: the city invested a lot in this way, says Hester Brown at Living Streets, and footfall for local shops trebled.

More ambitiously, Sloman quotes the example of the German city of Freiburg, where the council spent 30 years and considerable amounts of money transforming a city the size of Nottingham in a way which is almost unimaginable in Britain. “You go to the cycle station and there are dozens and dozens, perhaps hundreds, of bikes just waiting to be hired. There are places where roads have been completely closed to traffic... as you cycle around, it’s a busy city, not all of the cycle facilities are of the highest quality, but the way the streets are used there’s a much better balance between public transport, people walking, people on their bikes and cars... [they] can co-exist.” Freiburgers still want cars; from 1983 to 1995, the population grew by 13% and car ownership by twice that. But public transport use more than doubled in the same period.

“So, there are alternatives to the car...”

Soft measures are more esoteric, essentially marketing and advertising; telling people that there are alternatives to the car, holding their hand (metaphorically, at least) to the bus stop, encouraging them to change their behaviour. Sloman cites the example of Aylesbury, where the local council, worried by poor take-up of a new bus route, launched a leaflet drop and ad campaign so successful that ridership jumped 60%. Aspirational advertising, so beloved of the car companies, could work for other transport choices too. Transport for London is taking that route, turning heads with sassy ads and slogans, including stickers proclaiming: ‘My other car’s a bus’.

In good company

The success of the nation-wide company Liftshare is an example of the power of good marketing. In ten years, Liftshare has got 100,000 members, three quarters belonging to member organisations that range from household name international companies such as BT, to hospitals and schools, football clubs (Leicester and Norwich) and festivals. Glastonbury last year got 3,000 people to share cars. Ali Clabburn, founder and managing director of Liftshare, estimates that it keeps 10,000 cars off the road every day with a combined budget from members and itself of just £200,000 a year, “if that”. Which works out at under 40p per car per week...

Travel plans, a growing phenomenon, bring many of the ‘soft’ ideas together. Company travel planning as a profession celebrates its tenth anniversary this year, and councils, schools, universities, hospitals and other organisations have joined in too. At the most personal end of the scale are trials of ‘individualised marketing’, where experts analyse household travel patterns and explain to people how to replace some of their car journeys. This proved hugely successful in Perth in Western Australia, where an AUS$1.3 million (£500,000) trial reduced car use by 10%.

Companies have the advantage that staff converge on a single point from often similar starting points. Black, who’s also chairman of the Association for Commuter Transport, says he can typically reduce car use by 5-10% through a travel plan, and 20% “is possible”. At mobile phone company Orange, in Bristol, the proportion of staff driving to work fell even more dramatically, from nearly four out of five to just over a quarter.

“A new tram line is a faster ticket to promotion than a cycle strategy.”

It all sounds too good to be true. So why aren’t there more of these schemes? It’s partly just human nature. Most of the big companies have measures in place, but “the vast majority of companies feel it’s another thing they are going to get around to doing another day,” says Black. Others look to the wider environment – and inevitably blame local and national government. One problem picked out by Sloman is an ‘obsession’ with grand projects among politicians and council officers, who know a new tram line is a much faster ticket to promotion than co-ordinating the cycle strategy. The most commonly recurring theme, though, is lack of funding, particularly the ‘revenue’ funding (rather than capital expenditure) required for marketing and bus subsidies and other soft, small measures. And lack of time; in the UK, such initiatives are typically required to prove their success in at most three years or face the axe.

That, surely, is daft. The challenge of smarter transport is a momentous one. “People now believe they need their car for every journey,” says Sloman, “even when patently that isn’t true. We need to understand why people behave the way they do and how to create an environment in which the sustainable choice is the natural choice.” Freiburg’s successes on that score built up progressively over a 30-year plan. Our current crisis may demand more urgent answers, but our car-addicted society will take time to absorb the attractions of ‘small and soft’ alternatives.
They’re highly cost-effective, remember. It pays to work them out, to draw them together in coherent packages, to invest in compelling marketing. And to remember the Maidstone effect – the instant hit that turns to long, slow jam.

Driving change.

Juliette Jowit is environment and transport editor of The Observer.

22 May 2006

Juliette Jowit